About
I grew up paying attention to things that weren't asking for it. Old buildings, discarded objects, materials with visible histories. I'm not sure where that comes from, but it's never gone away.
I've been working as an artist out of studios across Toronto since 2003 — an OCAD graduate who somehow ended up spending more time in salvage yards than galleries.
In the early years I was drawn to the city itself: its geometry, its layered surfaces, the way Toronto's architecture holds light and history at the same time. The Living City series grew out of that — paintings that treated the urban landscape as abstract composition, dense with pattern and texture. Those works found their way onto the walls of Suits and, later, The Handmaid's Tale. A painting on a set becomes part of someone else's story. That felt right.
From 2009 to 2016, my studio was inside a former canning factory at 50 Carroll Street, rented from the family behind 507 Antiques — a sprawling antiques and architectural salvage warehouse that filled the building and spilled into the yard. Stone cherubs, iron scrollwork, furniture, chandeliers, roofing tin, finials, urns — stacked floor to ceiling, overflowing into the courtyard in every season. You couldn't walk to your car without stepping over a century of discarded buildings. It got into your head.
I started paying attention to the materials I was working on, not just the surfaces I was painting. The grain of the wood. The way salvage carries its past visibly — in scars, stains, compressions, sacred patterns worn into surfaces by decades of use. I found an abandoned encaustic painting through a Craigslist ad in 2013, rescued from a stranger's garage where it had sat for decades in the damp dark. I spent two days cleaning it with a toothbrush. That piece — Atlas — became a crowd favourite at my solo show, mostly by people who didn't even know the story. That told me something.
Then a war-travelled trunk arrived at my studio. A Dutch family had carried it across wartime Java, onto cattle cars, into military transport, across oceans. The husband had died a prisoner of war. A teenage daughter had crossed out the original family name in red paint and written her own. When I received it, I couldn't make something neutral with it. I researched the family, wrote the history, and donated a portion of the proceeds to the Canadian Red Cross in the daughter's name. The resulting artwork, Harmoniehof, was the clearest signal yet of where I needed to go.
After that came Gymnasia — maple gymnasium floors salvaged from Ryerson University, worn smooth by decades of sneakers and competition, sport regulation lines still intact. It was grounded in a real building, a real vote, a real flood in 1986. Then eight sections of Honest Ed's iconic marquee sign, among roughly twelve known to survive the 2017 teardown, rewired and relit. Each project pushed the same question further: what does an object carry after the people who used it are gone?
The Load Bearing Series is where that question lives now. The materials are old — some centuries old, pulled from sacred spaces, domestic spaces, places of transit and industry. What draws me to them isn't age for its own sake. It's the evidence of use. I'm drawn to objects that have been load-bearing in some way, literally or emotionally, and I'm asking what they still carry.
I'm not a historian. I'm making new work from materials that have already lived — putting them in conversation with each other and with the geometric, symbolic languages humans have always used to make sense of where we came from and what holds us up.
These pieces remember things. That's the point.